IT BEGINS WITH PRESENCE: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LEGACY OF JACK LEIGH
Paprika Southern
Spring 2018
By Bevin Valentine Jalbert
In the 1983 book Oystering: A Way of Life, Jack Leigh begins his introduction by
relating a childhood memory of an oysterman, saying, “I felt him to be a special
presence, a mysterious spirit who knew secrets I had yet to dream.” The prose is
layered and atmospheric, and Leigh sets the scene describing the man’s disappearance into the fog, even as the image recedes into memory. This man, a memory, no longer here, remains present in Leigh’s telling of the story, and Leigh captures his presence, if not literally, in the figures of the oystermen he photographed in the early 1980s. These workers become stand-ins for the absent man of Leigh’s memory.